Jekyll Serve

Then, start the Jekyll Server. I always like to give the --watch option so it updates the generated HTML when I make changes.

$ jekyll serve --watch

Now you can navigate to localhost:4000 in your browser to see the site.

Using Github Pages

You can host your Jekyll site for free with Github Pages. Click here for more information.

A configuration tweak if you're using a gh-pages sub-folder

In addition to your github-username.github.io repo that maps to the root url, you can serve up sites by using a gh-pages branch for other repos so they're available at github-username.github.io/repo-name.

This will ensure that the the correct relative path is constructed for your assets and posts. Also, in order to run the project locally, you will need to specify the blank string for the baseurl: $ jekyll serve --baseurl ''.

Disqus

To configure Disqus, set up a Disqus site with the same name as your site. Then, in _config.yml, edit the disqus_shortname value to enable Disqus.

Customizing the CSS

All variables can be found in the _sass/_variables.scss file, toggle these as you'd like to change the look and feel of Pixyll.

Page Animation

If you would like to add a fade-in-down effect, you can add animated: true to your _config.yml.

AnchorJS

AnchorJS: A JavaScript utility for adding deep anchor links to existing page content. AnchorJS is lightweight, accessible, and has no dependencies. You can turn it on by toggling enable_anchorjs. Because it offers many ways for customization, tweaks should be done in _includes/footer.html. Default settings after turning AnchorJS on are:

Web analytics and search engines

For Google Analytics set up the value for google_analytics, it should be something like google_analytics: UA-XXXXXXXX-X.

For Google Tag Manager set up the value for google_tag_manager, it should be something like: google_tag_manager: GTM-XXXXX.

Do not set both of above methods because this will cause conflicts and skew your reporting data.

Remember that you need to properly configure the GTM container in its admin panel if you want it to work. More info is available in GTM's docs.

Your website is, by default, set to be allowed for crawling and indexing by search engines. (Unless you made yourself a custom robots.txt file). You can use front matter settings on each page to control how search engines will it. Sometimes you may want to exclude a particular page from indexing or forbid Google to store a copy of your page in its cache. It is up to you. Use the meta_robots frontmatter key and assign values based on this table. Some examples:

In order to get more information about your website's status in search engines, you can register it in Google Search Console and/or Bing Webmaster Tools. Both these tools will ask you to authorize your website with them and there are couple of ways to do that. Pixyll supports verification via meta tags - just fill in values for google_verification and/or bing_verification in _config.yml, the verification strings and meta tags will then be added automatically.

If search engine optimization is your thing, you can also set up meta_description values for each page/post. By default Pixyll uses summary to populate the <meta name="description" content="..."> tag and falls back to description from _config.yml if summary is not present in page/post's front matter. The summary is also used for generating Open Graph tags. Why would you want to use a dedicated variable for meta description? Because character limit to properly display this description in search results (as a snippet) is way smaller than in Open Graph. It is recommended to keep it at 155-160 characters, for more in-depth info read this article.

And lastly - if you happen to write in language other than English be sure to change og_locale in _config.yml to reflect it.

Enjoy

I hope you enjoy using Pixyll. If you encounter any issues, please feel free to let me know by creating an issue. I'd love to help.

Upgrading Pixyll

Pixyll is always being improved by its users, so sometimes one may need to upgrade.

Ensure there's an upstream remote

If git remote -v doesn't have an upstream listed, you can do the following to add it:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/johnotander/pixyll.git

Pull in the latest changes

git pull upstream master

There may be merge conflicts, so be sure to fix the files that git lists if they occur. That's it!